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Open digital faculty do more than just share and participate in open resources; they transfer their approaches to the teaching space. Learning becomes a shared activity in which the students also collaborate and participate in shaping the course activities. Student participation takes place in open environments where students might tweet what they learn, share insights on a group blog, create their own website of resources, or participate in a class wiki.

The difference is that today's sharing facilitators leverage technology to reach a much wider audience.

Although the natural inclination toward sharing cannot be altered, the moral responsibility to share can be influenced by the surrounding culture. The sense of obligation to share or not to share may be similar to the decision to be a vegetarian. For some, it is a lifestyle choice that may form slowly over a long period of time after many conversations with friends and colleagues. For others, the change can be sudden: a paradigm shift caused by participation in an unusual event. If an institution places value on faculty participation in open academic communities and social media activities (e.g., academic blogging), that culture can slowly influence faculty to be more open.

There is a moral dimension to the process. It is one thing to memorise an answer which you have prepared, but it is wrong to present an answer prepared by someone else.

Answer memorisation is inevitable in high-stakes and somewhat predictable examinations.

High-stakes tests always corrupt teaching, learning and curriculum.

The greatest moralizing and socializing force of all time."

“I’m an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to the curriculum,” Mr Gove said. “Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages. That’s the best training of the mind and that’s how children will be able to compete.”

we've come to associate standardizing with raising standards

It's not there to identify what individuals can do. It's there to look at things to which they conform.

contributed to a lowering of morale

life isn't as simple as it once appeared. Career and Marriage are transformed from abstract hopes into concrete decisions. Every one that is made closes off other possibilities. And every so often, we take stock of life, pondering its purpose, what it is that makes us happy, our responsibilities to others, whether meaning can be found in our work, etc.

prep schools and top tier colleges traffic in a perverse illusion: that building a perfect resume is the same thing as building a perfect life

since every subculture has its pathologies, you're probably not doing things right unless the other people in your world are at least slightly uncomfortable with some way in which you're challenging its assumptions.

In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.

The problem is that high school is not college and completion of a dual enrollment high school class is not always a guarantee that students have learned the material.

Leaders who lose their way are not bad people; rather, they lose their moral bearings

we all have the capacity for actions we deeply regret unless we stay grounded.

Self-reflection: a path to leadership development

Out of State Tuition:   Fees:   30.00

evelop an understanding of themselves as readers and writers of world cultures who participate with others in responsible public discourse and have moral and ehtical responsibilities in that dis

Most Common Themes in Literature

n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.

Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach. Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning. I advocate a teacher-designed blended learning model, in which teachers determine the combination that's right for them and their students.

Can Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein be read as an early research ethics text?

Frankenstein is an early and balanced text on the ethics of research upon human subjects and that it provides insights that are as valid today as when the novel was written.

Mary Shelley conceived the idea for and started writing Frankenstein in 1816 and it was first published in 1818.1 In its historical context, the earlier 17th and 18th centuries had seen the early signs of the rise of science and experimentation. Francis Bacon (1561–1626) had laid the theoretical foundations in his “Great Insauration”2 and scientists such as Boyle, Newton, and Hooke developed the experimental methods. Sir Robert Talbor, a 17th century apothecary and one of the key figures in developing the use of quinine to treat fevers, underlined this: “the most plausible reasons unless backed by some demonstrable experiments seem but suppositions or conjectures”.3